OS Fermentation

16 January 2016, 11:00 - 18:00

WORKSHOP GIVEN BY LEILA NADIR & CARY PEPPERMINT (ECOARTTECH)

The OS Fermentation workshop is part of art duo Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s new Edible Ecologies project, a series of social sculptures that work collaboratively with local communities (cultural, bacterial, ecological) to remix historic food practices and remediate what they call “industrial amnesia.”

Taking place at community gardens, academic institutions, and public spaces, the OS Fermentation workshop works with participants to revive the ancient practice of fermentation as an alternative to industrial methods of food preservation, such as refrigeration and pasteurization. It is simultaneously a slow-cooking class, a healing ritual, and a conceptual-art experimentation with wild bacteria and food democracy. Each jar of fermented veggies taken home by participants is its own unfolding, unfinished, interactive artwork, part of a future meal that will boost digestion and immunity, and a viral performance of food independence in a time when diet, nutrition, and humanity’s relationships with edible substances have been industrialized. Like all our artworks, the OS Fermentation Workshop positions art as an urgent and necessary intervention operating between utility and imagination.

Performances of OSFW have taken place at Smack Mellon Gallery (Brooklyn), e‐flux (NYC), Clayton Williams Community Garden (NYC), the HyperPlace Harlem events at City College (NYC), and the University of Rochester. The project has received seed funding from The Canary Project and the University of Rochester.

Participants will need to bring their own knife and optional apron.

Working collaboratively as EcoArtTech since 2005, new media art duo Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint's environmental art projects take the form of architectural interventions and urban wilderness tours, net art and public performances, scholarly articles and poetic essays. They have been supported by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Franklin Furnace Fund.